Archive for the ‘Links’ Category

Todays “huge awesome fighting machine” post comes via the good ol’ Enlishrussia blog. They post great pictures of awesome Soviet era stuff, but it’s a bit disappointing that their descriptions tend to be between uninformative and completely fictional. This time the subject is a huge Soviet plane from the 30′s. About this they say:

…modern history lovers in Russia try to reconstruct according the plans left in once to be top-secret Russian army archives their look in full color. This is one example based on ideas of Russian aviation engineers of that times.

In reality it was a Russian 3D modeler by the name of Levin who modeled the huge warplane that might exist in some parallel universe where history turned out more like pulp scifi. I don’t speak any Russian so I have no idea if there are secret plans or if it’s just made up, but it doesn’t take away the fact that it looks great. And he made it even better and gave us a couple of pictures of the plane battling his older Nazi UFO model (Haunebu III to be exact – the same design you see in the Iron Sky teaser).

Talking of this Levin guy, you should also check out his airship model – it’s another awesome steampunkish creation:

Microsoft has launched the Windows 7 beta and the computing world is holding it’s breath to see if it’s rubbish. From the impossibly popular webcomic (I mean, it’s funny but it’s not _that_ funny… right?) xkcd comes this review that will live in infamy.

It’s very nearly three years since the premiere of Star Wreck, and we’ve largely moved on to bigger, better things, but the film seems to have taken on a life of its own. Just today, “Mithridates” of Page F30 blogged about a novel use for the film in a way that combines Google services and language, two subjects rather close to my own heart. He (she?) uses it as a tool for learning Finnish.

Mithridates had fed the Finnish subtitles of Star Wreck into the Google Translate service, and compared the resulting English (that was not particularly bad, surprisingly) to the Finnish to get an idea of the flow of the dialogue. For added punch, he separated all the words with full stops, creating a word list for which Google then provided the translations. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you: automated dictionary lookup!

Earlier, Mithridates wrote about the value of the annotated translation to the study of Finnish as a foreign language. Obviously, this is mainly useful for people who already know the basics of Finnish grammar and so on, but still – it’s so gratifying when people find unexpected new uses for your work. That’s communality at its best!

It was a few weeks after the sharks, and the flying. The panic was sinking in, the unreality, punditry, end of the world.. itry. After the initial safety broadcasts, safety broadcast ignorings, and such, there were the inevitable rash of dog eatings. But soon after, it was noticed that among the dog remains, there was something missing.

Cat remains.

Cats weren’t being eaten, at least by sharks. Inexplicably, and of only mild slightly more than disinterest to cats, the sharks, for lack of a better word, liked them. But in the opposite of the desire to eat, sense. There was much discussion among the edible folk as to why. Much interest in studying cats, capturing and dissecting them, to learn why, was had. Except.

They had to first get past the sharks.

Check out art by The Searcher. You might know him from such internet classics as “Jesus Riding Dinosaurs“, but there’s more. There is a word for stuff like this and it’s AWESOME.